Items tagged with RAID

What's this, yet another SSD product tap-dancing its way through the HotHardware lab? It's hard to believe that a product category has so much R&D being poured into it, spurring new releases at such a fevered pitch. The investment in the relatively fledgling storage technology makes perfect sense to us, but the average mainstream consumer probably raises their head to notice only the bigger, more prominent buzz-worthy products hitting the market as of late. There is almost too much in the product category to absorb actually. That being the case, we'd offer...Read more...

Looking to beef up your storage potential? Who isn't, right? Buffalo is one of the bigger names in the dedicated storage business, and today they are refreshing their DriveStation family. That's a pretty robust family, with the DriveStation Duo and DriveStation Quad (formerly Quattro) seeing updates. The new multi-drive external units ship with NovaBACKUP Business Essentials, and if you aren't in need of multiple drives just yet, the newly announced DriveStation Axis should be perfect given its single-drive status. The DriveStation Quad is a 4-drive, RAID enabled storage solution for small servers,...Read more...

SSD manufacturers have been energetically rolling out new high-end, high-capacity products based around updated Indilinx, SandForce, or Marvell controllers, while simultaneously also introducing smaller SSDs with better performance and lower prices than we saw with first-generation products. As SSDs become more popular and economical, we're seeing the rise of yet another consumer storage tier, over and above even the more expensive, high-performing SSDs: Flash storage mated to PCI-Express. OCZ has launched its own product into the burgeoning sector, the RevoDrive... OCZ RevoDrive Review:...Read more...

It's hard to remember that before the advent of SSDs, storage performance was a rather tepid topic. Save for the introduction of occasional new features like NCQ, hard drives continued along a mostly predictable path of rising capacities and (slightly) higher performance. If you wanted top-end performance, you bought a WD VelociRaptor or constructed a RAID config or arcane assembly of repurposed workstation and / or server-class hardware. Now the market has flipped upside down. SSD manufacturers have been energetically rolling out new high-end, high-capacity products based around updated Indilinx,...Read more...

If rumors floating around the 'Net are true, Intel is set to drop support for the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus when it launches its next-generation 6-series of chipsets with support for Sandy Bridge-based LGA1155 processors. In case you're wondering, no, neither Sandy Bridge derived processors or their accompanying motherboards will allow for the use of current Core i5/i7 hardware. As far as we're concerned, PCI can't die quickly enough. Intel began working on the standard 20 years ago and made it the preferred interconnect standard for second-generation Pentium systems as early...Read more...

The original Drobo direct-attached-storage (DAS) device hit the scene in summer of 2007 and took the tech world by storm. It represented a new paradigm in how you could implement external, redundant back-up storage with much of the same goodness that RAID offers, but without a number of the headaches and the complexity that also comes with traditional RAID solutions. The Drobo still used RAID to redundantly store data across multiple hard drives, but did so using Data Robotics’ own version of it, which it calls BeyondRAID. The primary advantages that Data Robotics’ BeyondRAID...Read more...

The original Drobo direct-attached-storage (DAS) device hit the scene in summer of 2007 and took the tech world by storm. It represented a new paradigm in how you could implement external, redundant back-up storage with much of the same goodness that RAID offers, but without a number of the headaches and the complexity that also comes with traditional RAID solutions. The Drobo still used RAID to redundantly store data across multiple hard drives, but did so using Data Robotics’ own version of it, which it calls BeyondRAID (see the table below). The primary advantages that Data Robotics’...Read more...

Ready for a little "inside baseball" when it comes to storage and semiconductors? PMC-Sierra, which bills itself as the "premier Internet infrastructure semiconductor solution provider," has today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Adaptec in order to acquire their channel storage business. The channel storage business includes Adaptec's RAID storage product line, board logistics capabilities and SSD cache performance solutions. The deal requires PMC-Sierra to pay approximately $34 million in cash for the acquisition and assume certain liabilities related to the business,...Read more...

LaCie and Symwave have teamed up to create the 2Big USB 3.0, a dual hard disk RAID 0/1 storage solution that uses the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 standard. Symwave’s USB 3.0 standard-compliant dual SATA and RAID bridge controller powers the 2Big USB 3.0. According to LaCie, the 2Big USB 3.0 is capable of burst read speeds of up to 275MB per second. The 2Big USB 3.0 will be available in up to 4TB capacities early next year. LaCie Partners with Symwave to Introduce World’s First USB 3.0 Dual-Drive RAID Storage Solution LaCie 2Big USB 3.0 delivers record speed with performance up to 275 MB/s December 17,...Read more...

The first time we looked at Fusion-io's ioDrive product, we offered the notion that it was a "disruptive technology", something that had the potential to set the industry on its ear. Of course the ioDrive is an enterprise-class product that showed the significant potential of PCI Express direct-attached SSD storage but its cost structure was such that the mainstream market couldn't possibly even begin to justify it, no matter what the upside performance looked like. And then of course we heard of Fusion-io's more consumer-targeted play, the ioXtreme, which debuted at E3 this past summer....Read more...

NAS devices come in many different shapes and sizes, as well as with different capacities and features. But for the most-reliable type of storage solution, the NAS devices of choice should be a multi-drive unit with RAID support. It is important to keep in mind, however, that while RAID adds extra layers of fault tolerance in the form redundant data storage--thus making your data's storage more reliable--it is still not a replacement for backing up your data. The best RAID solutions offer easy-to-use and robust tools for doing both.One great example of such a device is the Synology Disk Station...Read more...

The name "Colossus", it conjures up something, well, huge. Though huge could mean many things. Are we talking something physically huge, huge as in something of monumental proportions that might otherwise change the market landscape or huge as in benchmark shattering kind of huge? As you might agree, huge is relative but it's safe to say the folks at OCZ hope their Colossus drive is going to be a huge hit in the market. We've been lucky enough to score some early shots of Colossus in the flesh and surprisingly, it's not quite what we expected. In fact, we were pleasantly...Read more...

Although the worldwide economy may be shrinking, our needs as consumers to store large amounts of data continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Whereas only a few years ago it was uncommon for most PC users to have more than just a few digital images or media files, today virtually every aspect of our lives has some sort of digital component. Our mobile phones now take pictures, shoot video, record audio and handle e-mail. it seems like everyone has a vast MP3 collection. We all create numerous documents, presentations, etc. And high-resolution, multi-megapixel digital cameras are prolific--and all...Read more...

We've certainly heard of Fusion-io's bleeding edge PCI Express-based SSD solution but to date haven't yet gotten the chance to check it out on the test bench here at HotHardware. In addition, though we've put Intel's wonderfully fast X25-M SSD through its paces in stand-alone testing, imagine what it would be like with up to four drives in RAID 0. You see where we're going here, a battle royal of what is arguably some of the fastest SSD storage technology money can buy right now. So the stage is set but before we get into ripping up benchmarks, let's expand on what we think might...Read more...